Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Emma could not think of Roland until it was through, and then — wending around her howling guilt, bracing herself against the shock of having committed once again a sin her mother would have disowned her for, not to mention Mary, oh — it was to wonder: would he care? He would want to smash their heads in, he would threaten to tell the parish, ruin her, but would he care ? Beyond his rage, would it be Emma that he wanted? He would want his Wife, yes, his Girl, an idea of her that went back to the South End saloon where he had found her working as a barmaid, allowing a pinch here or there in exchange for extra tips. He had been one of the pinchers until he fell in love with her and wheedled and begged, claiming he was now too respectable for pinching. Through the weeks of their engagement and the early months of their marriage, when Emma was learning Roland’s many base habits, she kept waiting for him to use her beginnings against her. But he never had, a mercy that reminded her, when she needed reminding, of Roland’s fundamental goodness. Sometimes, in tender moments between them, he even romanced her with memories of her bar days. Not a shred of sentiment in you, he’d growl proudly in her ear. So practical, his hand finding its way under the hem of her dress.

She believed he was right. Her sentiment had been bled out of her: incompletely by her tough, corn-haired mother; more starkly as she watched her father lose his work; and finally, wholly, when she left Banagher with her cousins and landed in Boston with nothing but her name. It was Eimhear then but became Emma within days.

And so she told herself, as she lay in Josiah Story’s office-thin arms on a deep white sofa in a bathhouse larger than her entire house, covered in an unimaginably soft quilt he called an afghan, that if Roland were ever to find out — though he must never find out — she could explain it as a sort of business agreement. An abhorrent, blasphemous agreement, but a practical one. She slept with the man in exchange for the perry press, a shack to house it, jobs for the boys down at the quarry. She would not tell about the necklace. She would say nothing of the hand cream he had given her tonight — their fourth night, she had not been able to keep from knowing, in the same way she always knew to the penny how much money she had in the jar under her bed, and always knew the number and ages of her children, even when Roland forgot. A reflex, to count and track and measure, and so, Night four, she’d thought as she lay low in Story’s backseat, bracing herself when they hit the bumps on Concord Street, and just as she started to berate herself, How can this be? Shame! Story’s pale hand fell her way across the backseat, wagging the bottle of cream like a toy, and she grabbed it, the fancy cut glass imprinting flowers into her palm, the scent of flowers making her sneeze. He laughed. “Massage it into your hands,” he said in his slow, strange, satisfied way. And she did.

This was the new trouble in her life. This was what she had known the first night she woke to the milky arc of Story’s headlights sweeping the walls of her house: she was susceptible. For as long as Emma could remember, she had been the opposite, anchored and hard. Her earliest memories were of infants crying, of holding, changing, feeding them. She prided herself on her steadiness, her lack of surprise no matter what occurred. There was the filthy South End, there was Roland, there was Gloucester, there was the little drafty house in the woods whose chimney liked to catch on fire, there were Emma’s hands always figuring out what to do. The children were never planned but neither were they unexpected; even Lucy Pear, of whom Emma had had no warning, had not come as a shock. She fed them all, clothed them, washed their messes, didn’t blink at their cries, watched her oldest two go off and fall for a little bit of attention, an adventure. Juliet was married to a successful cabinetmaker now. Peter was up in Canada. And through it all Roland had been gone more than he’d been home and Emma had never, not once, felt lust when she looked at another man, or complained about Roland’s comings and goings, or allowed the children to speak of missing him, or warned the older boys off becoming fishermen themselves. It was as if she’d believed, if she held the world at a constant distance, that it would hold her back, if not close then at least upright and unscathed.

She had ignored his flirtations in his office, resisted answering his eyes the afternoon he came to the house bearing the wad of cash and the necklace, but then she had woken to those lights. Lost motorist was her first thought, because automobiles so seldom drove that far up the road and because it went by twice before settling into an idle. Then she rose to her knees and recognized the whitewalls of the Duesenberg’s six tires.

His being there was so bold — so stupid, Roland would say — that she found herself smiling. What made him so certain he’d wake her and not the children? What made him think she wouldn’t shoot him, let alone that she’d be willing to get in his car? She was unaccustomed to such optimism. Yet it shone on her and made her feel supple, and as though she had no choice but to go out and meet it.

She crept out the back door. Her rope cut, just like that.

Massage it into your hands.

Roland would call Story’s way of talking fancy, like the bottle, but Emma heard it wasn’t simply that; she heard the effort it took him to push certain words around his mouth. Off-gone, he’d said, drawing the heavenly blanket over her, and she could feel him go hot at the exotic syllables. They lay under it now, their sweat cooling, the bathhouse flickering whitely around them. Four nights and still she knew almost nothing about the man, apart from what anyone could easily know. He ran the quarry but didn’t own it. He had a wife and a house that looked large enough for four, maybe five bedrooms, but no children. She assumed a sorrow in him. But anyone could do that.

“Are you sleeping?” he asked.

“No.” She touched the back of the hand that rested on her stomach. It was hairless, and soft, everything that Roland’s was not. She wasn’t certain that she felt a great desire for these hands, but they fascinated her, and they touched her as though she fascinated them.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t fall asleep.”

“I’m not worried.”

A scurrying beyond the door made them sit up. The sound stopped, then began again on the roof, louder, before resolving into the pattern of a chipmunk or squirrel. They lay back down, Emma’s head on his chest, which was nearly as hairless as his hands. A sudden vertigo washed through her, guilt and revulsion entwined. She sat up.

“Your wife must sleep well, for you not to worry,” she said.

“Very well, yes. It was part of her education, when she was small. She and her brothers would roam all over with their father — this was for timber, and then the railroad — staying in hotels or strangers’ houses, she and her brothers sharing beds, and she would find a way to sleep, no matter what. Sometimes, she says, they would be directly over a depot, where the men repaired the engines all night, clanking and banging. One time she slept through the whistle of a night train they were meant to board, and her brothers carried her between them onto the train, set her down on her bunk, watched her sleep through the night all the way to Omaha, then carried her to the house of their father’s friend, where she slept right through the rooster’s crow in the morning.” He paused. “She tells it better than me. Susannah’s a very good storyteller.”

“You tell it fine,” Emma said. He loved his wife, she thought, but not in the way he should have — not in the way that would have made him ashamed to go on about her to Emma in such bland, friendly detail. Last time he had told her about Susannah’s childhood pets, and the time before that about Susannah’s love of the stars and her skills with a telescope, and the time before that — the first time — about Susannah’s remarkable strength as a swimmer. Somehow the more sweet things Story told her about Susannah, the more unreal she became to Emma. She was a tale of a wife, a character.